Compensation for the loss of inflections

If grammatical categories were indicated in Old English via inflections then the loss of the latter implied that something took their place. The answer to the question ‘what?’ is simple: word order and the increased functionalisation of prepositions. In Old English the order S - O - V (Subject - Object - Verb) was common but with the loss of inflections the indentification of Subject and Object was not always that simple. For this and other contributory reasons the order S - V - O (Subject - Verb - Object) became more usual in the course of the Middle English period. The order V - S - O (Verb - Subject - Object) which was also found in Old English declined in frequency, remaining most tenaciously after adverbs where it is still sometimes found today as in Hardly had he left the room when she rang.

The increased use of prepositions served the function of rendering sentences unambiguous. A simple example illustrates this. The German sentence Er schrieb ihr einen Brief has variants like Ihr schrieb er einen Brief or Einen Brief hat er ihr geschrieben all of which are possible because the inflected forms of the pronouns and the object noun are unambiguous with regard to sentence function. In English there are two equivalents to the sentence He wrote her a letter and He wrote a letter to her, the former uses word order to indentify the sentence elements functionally — indirect object precedes direct object — and the latter employs a preposition to to identify the indirect object. For topicalisation as in the German examples modern English has to resort to intonational strategies (stressing the highlighted element) or to the syntactic device of clefting which retains the prepositional object but moves it to the front by embedding it into a dummy sentence: It's to her that he wrote the letter.

Source: www.uni-due.de

Section 6. Early New English. Me and ene grammar.

1. Early New English background. Conditions for linguistic unity.

2. The establishment of the literary norm. The Age of Renaissance.

3. The Age of Normalisation.

4. English outside Britain.

5. Changes in phonetics and spelling.

6. Development of the vocabulary.

7. Causes of grammatical changes. ME and ENE grammar:

   1. the Noun;

   2. the Adjective;

   3. the Pronoun;

   4. the Article;

   5. the Verb.

1. Early New English is considered to be the period of the national literary English language formation. There were two major events that influenced the rise of the language and its further development: unification of the country and the progress of culture. Economic and political unification of the country prompted linguistic unity, and due to the progressive influence of the Renaissance movement the language underwent a period of the greatest changes it had ever seen.

In the 15^th and 16^th c. all the basics of the political, social and economic life in the country were changing: the old feudal relations were dying out and the new bourgeois mode of production was establishing its position. Trade, farming and cattle breeding were developing rapidly. The first big enterprises began to export woolen cloth. There appeared two new social classes, those of bourgeoisie, and workers. Due to these changes people from different regions of the country came to big cities in search of work, and that led to strengthening of ties between the various parts of the country.

In the first quarter of the 15^th c. England became a centralized state. The unification was preceded by the War of the Roses (1455-1485) which, on the one hand, weakened the English throne, and, on the other hand, resulted in the establishment of a strong royal power under Henry VII, the founder of the Tudor dynasty. His reign is known as the period if prosperity and stability for England. Henry VII built a new nation-state on the ruins of the old nobility which had practically exterminated itself during the wars. He based his power on the support of the new aristocracy which he created out of the rural and town bourgeoisie and is known for having laid the foundations of one of the most fruitful periods of the English history. He was diplomatic enough to avoid quarrels with neighbouring Scotland and France and careful in handling the state finances. It was Henry VII who built a powerful merchant fleet, which led to England's domination in international trade. Those were important steps towards the establishment of England as a world power.

His son, Henry VIII, was a brilliant scholar and tried to make England politically important in Europe, but he was too self-centered and extravagant to realize the idea. Once having been nominated 'Defender of the Faith' for his theological work as a young man, Henry had little influence on the Pope of Rome, and the Church could disobey him. Wishing to subdue it he broke with the church of Rome and declared himself head of the English Church in the first half of the XVI c. on the pretext that the Pope refused to give agreement to his divorce with his first wife, who failed to supply him with a male heir. The event marked the complete victory of the crown and beginning of the absolute monarchy.

Elizabeth I contributed much to the unification and prosperity of the country avoiding quarrels with European countries and spending a considerable part of the budget on building a strong fleet. The role of the Parliament, tough was quite limited: it was called only to obtain and to win support of merchants and yeomen. The House of Commons became more influential (because it was richer) though it was not representative. It was commonly practiced to sell official positions in those days.

The political and economic unification was accompanied by progressive changes in the realm of culture. The 15^th and 16^th c. are marked by an interest in literature and a general efflorescence of culture. In England a new requirement of the period was the education of the newly formed class of bourgeoisie. In the 12^th c. the universities of Oxford and Cambridge were founded, they became the centers of humanistic learning. Education was no longer a privilege of the clergy. As before, Latin was the main subject in schools. Scientific and philosophical treatises were written in Latin, Latin was the language of religion, philosophy and science. English, being considered a rude tongue, was used only as an instrument to teach Latin.

For the language, the greatest achievement was the introduction of printing. The earliest publications included the poems of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower and John Lydgate. The first printer, William Caxton, was interested in publishing the works of the medieval writers from England and the continent. The published works included many translations from French.

Before publishing, William Caxton edited the texts so that to bring the language into conformity with the norms of the London dialect. This had contradicting effects: on the one hand, he sometimes distorted the manuscripts, on the other hand, he prompted the further spread of the London dialect. The language the first printers used was the London literary English established since the Age of Chaucer, and due to the low price of the printed books it was quickly carried to other regions and later was imitated in the written works all over England.

Due to printing, English spelling became more normalized. The variants given by Caxton were accepted as standard and have survived till nowadays.

2. The establishment of the literary norm of the language was closely connected with the period of literary Renaissance which began in Europe in the early 15^th c. and spread to England in the 16^th c. This epoch was the period of newly aroused interest to the linguistic matters. As before, the main subject at schools was Latin and the English language was considered as a "rude" tongue that could be used as an instrument to teach Latin.

At the same time, discussions concerning the possibility of writing scientific works in the vernacular were held in England, France, Italy and other countries of Western Europe. The very fight for the native tongue was progressive and was an expression of nation's consciousness. Simultaneously, the most progressively-minded circles of European society fought with scholasticism of Middle Ages, representatives of which tried to preserve Latin as a language of religious and scientific treatises that provided against availability of the latter for all the social layers.

But it was necessary to have scientific books in the vernacular to simplify the teaching process. The end of XV c. was the time of great geographic discoveries. The merchants wishing to trade with the New World, and that required the knowledge of mathematics, astronomy, sea navigation and the elementary data about the countries they were going to. So, while the supporters of both Latin and English were holding on their debates the unknown translators did their job and translated the descriptions of the overseas lands and the guides in the exact sciences. In the course of the XVI c. Latin was completely ousted from all the spheres of writing. Anyway, the English language did not have its own terminology, and the terms were created on the bases of Latin borrowings.

Of all the important events that took place in the Early New English period introduction of printing was to play the crucial role in establishing English as the national language. By the end of XVI c. English had become a national language. The difference with a dialect is geographic: the dialect is spoken on a certain territory and is not understood beyond it, whereas the national language is an accepted standard all over the country. The dialect by that time had had no written form as the national language was used in all spheres of writing: state documents, scientific works and fiction. It also becomes everyday speech of educated citizens, especially in London with its suburbs. In more distant areas dialects still exist and influence standard English which results in the creation of local dialects, but gradually the national tongue absorbs them. Still, the dialects survive in oral speech till nowadays.

T he 15^th and 16^th c. in Europe are marked by a renewed interest in classical art and literature. The key literary figures in the English Renaissance are now generally considered to be the poet Edmund Spenser; the philosopher Francis Bacon; the poets and playwrights Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson; and the poet John Milton. Sir Thomas More is often considered one of the earliest writers of the English Renaissance. He wrote his “Utopia” in Latin, it was translated into English 35 years later. During the period many classics, collections of sermons and theological compositions were translated into English. The other representatives of the age were poets John Lyly, Philip Sydney. William Shakespeare is recognized to be the master of the English tongue of the period. His works best represent the language of the day. His vocabulary included over 20,000 words, his style is characterized by freedom in creating new words and new meanings and versatility of grammatical construction.

3. The age of Renaissance was followed by the age of "normalization", or "fixing the language norms". In 1664 a special committee for "improving the English tongue" was established by the Royal Society. Its members considered the fixed structures of the dead Latin and Greek languages to be the perfection to be followed and they suggested that no linguistic change should "corrupt" the English language. The XVIII c. is known for the attempts to block the language progress and fix the language phenomena as they were. The movement was supported by the writer Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), the founders of the first English newspapers Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, the authors of prescriptive English grammars and the great 18^th c. lexicographers.

In the 60-s of XVI c. France was the first European country to recognize the necessity to teach the vernacular at school alongside other subjects. The idea was favoured by the progressive people in England and from the beginning of XVII c. English was taught at schools as well.

It was widely understood that it was necessary to distinguish the "right" in the language from the "wrong". In 1589 George Puttenham in his book "The art of English Poesy" wrote that the speech of the court and Londoners was to be taken as the norm. Still, in the very national standard there were variants in both pronunciation and grammar. XVII and XVIII c. saw the appearance of numerous grammars and dictionaries describing the rules of pronunciation and grammar. Alongside linguistic works the questions of the language were widely discussed in other educated people's circles.

The creation of the Academy of Sciences in France which concentrated mainly on the problems of the language, aroused great interest in England. The necessity of a similar Academy, whose duty would have been to establish the linguistic norm and to make its use obligatory, was widely pronounced in England. Several projects of such an Academy are still preserved but the idea was not to be realized as the bourgeois revolution and Restoration drew the public's attention away from the linguistic matters. Later orthographers and grammarians were active enough to make the establishment of the Academy unnecessary.

The most important linguistic works of the period were Hart's "Orthographie of English speech" (1580), William Bullokar's "Booke at large for the amendment of Orthographie for English Speech", A. Gill's "Logonomia Anglica" (1621), Charles Butler's "English Grammar" (1634), Ch. Cooper's "Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae" (1685), John Jones's "Practical Phonography" (1701) and John Walker's "Historical Grammar" (1801). These authors not only tried to describe the grammatical level of the language but also the rules of reading, spelling and pronunciation. They tried to describe the contemporary pronunciation and recommend on how to articulate the sound, but the drawback was that not always did they distinguish between the sound and the letter; sometimes they confused digraphs and diphthongs.

The first English grammars were compiled on the basis of the Latin ones, those of W. Bullokar (XVI c.), B. Jonson, Ch. Butler, G.Wallis and others. They interpreted language phenomena as they were in Latin grammars. Anyway, in this period there were grammarians who stuck to the traditional views and those who were more progressive. They did not agree on the points of parts of speech, number of noun cases, etc.

In XVII and the beginning of XVIII c. their were two trends in grammar: representatives of the first one considered that language norms were to proceed from reason, or logics, whereas their opponents were of the view that rules should be established on the basis of traditional usage. In fact, these principles of 'reason' and 'tradition' were only considered when solving disputable questions, e.g. when it was necessary to give preference to one of the two existing variants.

In the second half of XVIII c. the grammarians were aiming at 'perfecting' the language and fixing it forever. The attempts were preceded by the fact that the linguists having witnessed the unavoidable linguistic evolution were frightened by the fact of the possible oblivion of their great countrymen, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dryden and the others. Their second task consisted in creating the rules and recommendations because by the end of XVIII c. it was commonly understood that the idea to fix the language was nothing more but utopia.

The most outstanding representative of the "correctness", or "reason" trend, was R. Lowth, the author of "A Short Introduction to English Grammar" (1758). In this book, a volume of recommendations and prohibitions, Lowth says his word against using double comparatives (more stronger), against the It's me construction. He considers the variant had better to an incorrect decoded form of the abbreviation I'd better, instead of I would better.

The opposite trend is represented by J. Priestley, the author of "The Rudiments of English Grammar" (1761). Priestley insists on following the traditional usage though in disputable matters he prefers to be "reasonable", thus indirectly supporting his opponents.

"English Grammar" published in 1795 by an American Lindley Murray got the widest recognition and was used in XIX c. for teaching many generations of Englishmen. Murray declares himself a supporter of the "tradition" but, in fact, he establishes certain obligatory rules, e.g. he prohibits adverbs without the suffix –ly, as in Do it quick!, and the combination these kind of things. Murray's book was republished unchanged more than 150 times and than, more than 100 times with amendments.

Meanwhile, lexicographers were working at fixing the English vocabulary. The first dictionaries of XV c. were Latin-English, but later, in XVI c. there also appeared dictionaries of "hard" words including archaic and the rarely used Latin words (Robert Cawdrey and H. Cockeram). E. Coles compiles a dictionary of robbers' jargon.

The explanatory dictionaries of the period did not describe all the words in the language and the etymological data sometimes did not coincide with the real origin of the words but they were an important step forward. Nathaniel Bailey's "Universal Etymological English Dictionary" included the greater portion of the Early New English lexis and gave information on the origin of the words.

In 1755 there appears "A Dictionary of the English Language, in which the words are deduced from their originals and illustrated in their different significations by examples from the best writers" compiled by Samuel Johnson. Johnson tries to preserve the orthography of the day; in pronunciation he distinguishes between 2 types – "cursory and colloquial" and "regular and solemn" – and recommends the latter, which is characterized by the distinct pronunciation of words. The entries of Johnson's dictionary contain definitions of meaning, illustrations of usage, information on the words' etymology and stylistic comments. Johnson did not include professionalisms in his dictionary as he considered it impossible to know all the professions well enough to be entitled to give explanations to the terms.

The importance of Johnson's work was too great to let the later authors deviate from the rules prescribed by the dictionary. Today the Oxford Dictionary is based on the data gathered by Samuel Johnson.

4. In the last three hundred years the English language has reached all the continents of the world and the number of English speaking people has increased greatly. In Old English and Early Middle English the English dialects were only spoken on the territory known as England proper; from Late Middle English to the 17^th c. it occupied a wider area extending to the whole of the British Isles with the exception of some mountainous areas in Scotland and Wales. The number of English speaking people was about one and a half or two million people at the beginning of XI c.; in 1700 it was over eight million speakers; by 1900 it had reached 123 million people.

In XIX c. there appeared the first works on the American English language. The first works containing Americanisms was "A Vocabulary, or Collection of Words and Phrases which have been supposed to be peculiar to the United States of America" by John Pickering. Anyway, Pickering tried to avoid using non-British patterns.

American English was proclaimed to be an independent language by Noah Webster (1758 – 1843) whose work was opposed to Pickering's in an attempt to defend the Americans' right to have their own language. In 1828 he published "An American Dictionary of the English Language" in which he gave the American variants of pronunciation and spelling. Webster, supporting the idea of the language simplification, played an important role in the establishing of the simplified variants of spelling accepted today.

The disputable question today is that of the status of the language in America. As is known, British and American English are not different enough not to be understood by the either side; any person knowing one of the variants can easily understand a written text in the other. These facts prove that the American variant cannot be separated as the American language.

On the other hand, the language of the USA is a state language, the language of the American nation and cannot be considered as a "corrupt" variant of British English. There have been views, popularizing the idea of American English being an independent language, e.g. H.L. Menken in his book "The American Language" (1938) insists that the language of the USA has nothing in common with that of Britain except the origin. He also insists on making slang the norm of the language.

English expansion to Canada started in XVII c. In XVIII c. the number of British immigrants grew rapidly. The newcomers from Scotland and Ireland inhabited the territory, which got the name of Nova Scotia. In 1763, after the British interference Canada was made a part of British territories, and in 1867 it became a British dominion. Since 1931 Canada has been included into the Commonwealth. French has been preserved in some areas, e.g. in Quebec. English is the state language, it has but a few differences with the American variant.

The expansion of English to Asia is mainly connected with the occupation of India, acquiring some other possessions in Asia and turning them into colonies, dominions or protectorates. In this way the English language spread to many Asian countries as the language of state and writing.

Australia, once being a place of deportation of British convicts, later saw a flow of immigrants attracted by the free grants of land and, then, by the discovery of gold. The greater number of the immigrants were from Great Britain. Some linguists regard Australian English to be an independent geographical variant of English but the difference is not great, it is confined to some phonetic and lexical differences. At the end of XIX c. J. Lake published "A Dictionary of Australian Words" (1898).

Like in America, there are two opposing movements in the questions of the language status in Australia: representatives of the first prefer to keep to tradition and maintain the British norm, the other ones insist on the right to have their own language. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), as distinct from BBC, broadcasts in Australian English attracting more and more viewers.

5. The numerous changes in the phonetic system of the language that took place in the course of Middle English and Early New English influenced both the consonants and the vowels.

The vowels in the unstressed position which had already been neutralized to the (ә) type during Middle English are dropped in New English if they are found in the endings of words, e.g.

nama (OE) – name (ME) – name (NE);

sunu (OE) – sone (ME) – son (NE).

Sometimes the vowel is preserved for phonetic reasons:

wanted, dresses.

Stressed vowels have undergone both qualitative and quantitative changes. All long monophthongs in the XV – XVII c. underwent The Great Vowel Shift, due to which the vowels were narrowed and fronted:

[ā] > [ei]: make – make;

[ē] > [i:]: see – see;

[o] < [ou]: ston – stone, etc.

The long close vowels [ū] and [ī] firstly changed into diphthongs of the [uw] or [ij] type, but they were unstable and gradually gave way to [au] and [ai]:

[u] > [au]: hous – house;

[i] > [ai]: time – time.

Two short monophthongs changed their quality in New English (XVII c.):

[a] > [æ]: that – that;

[u] > [Λ]: cut – cut.

These processes depended to a certain extent upon the preceding sounds, e.g. a) when [a] was preceded by [w] it changed into [כ]; b) [u] preceded by [p], [b] or [f] often did not change into [Λ]:

a) [a] > [æ]: that (ME) – that (ME)

[a] > [כ]: was (ME) – was (NE) (but: wax [wæks])

b) bull, butcher, pull, push, full, etc. (but: but [bΛt])

The consonant [r] had its influence upon the Great Vowel Shift. When a long vowel was followed in a word by the consonant [r] the given consonant did not prevent the Great Vowel Shift, but the resulting vowel was more open than the resulting vowel in such cases when the long vowel undergoing the shift was followed by a consonant other than [r], e.g.:

[ei] but [εə] fate but fare

[i:] but [iə] steep but steer

[ai] but [aiə] time but tire

[u:] but [uə] moon but moor

[au] but [auə] house but hour

Two out of the four Middle English diphthongs changed in New English, the diphthong [ai] becoming [ei] and the diphthong [au] contracted to [כ:]:

[ai] > [ei]: dai – day;

[au] > [כ:]: lawe – law.

The most important quantitative change of vowels was the lengthening of the vowel, when it was followed by the consonant [r]. Short vowels followed by the consonant [r] became long after the disappearance of the given consonant at the end of the word or before another consonant:

[a] > [a:]: farm – farm;

[o] > [כ:]: hors – horse.

The consonant [r] following the vowels [e], [i] and [u] changed not only their quantity but also quality:

her [hε:];

fur [fε:];

fir [fε:].

The sound [h] before [t] also changed the quality of the preceding vowel:

might [mait];

night [nait];

fight [fait].

In the system of consonants there were the following changes:

1) appearance of [g] and development of [dg] and [t∫] from palatal consonants. This change took place in native words. Thus Middle English [sj], [zj], [tj], [dj] gave in New English the sounds [s], [g], [t∫], [dg]. This change took place in borrowed words.

2) Certain consonants disappeared at the end of the word or before another consonant, e.g. the sound [r] was longer pronounced in the mentioned position: stern, horn, firm, horse, etc.

3) The fricatives [s], [θ] and [f] were voiced after unstressed vowels or in words having no sentence stress – the so-called “Verner’s Law in New English”: possess, observe; the, this, that, there, then, though, etc.

While the Old English spelling was mainly phonetic, Middle English and New English witnessed many changes in the English spelling, which were the result of the influence of other languages. The first serious shift in the sphere of spelling took place after the Norman conquest, when some runic characters went out of use, e.g. þ ("thorn") and ρ ("wen"); ð and þ [ð/θ] were replaced by th (þat – that), æ [ę] was replaced by e (lætan - leten), ρ [w] was replaced by w. Simultaneously, some letters, which had already existed in Old English, expanded their sphere of usage, like the letter k; some letters were introduced:

j for [dg] (in words of French origin: joy, judge),

g for [g] and [dg] (god, singe), v for [v] (love),

k for [k] (instead of c before front vowels and n: OE drincan – ME drinken, OE cnawan – ME knowen),

q for [kw] or [k] (OE cwen – NE queen) and z for [z] (zeal).

Many digraphs appeared:

ch for the sound [t∫]: cild – child;

ch for the sound [k] in Latin borrowings: chemical;

ph for the sound [f] in Latin borrowings: phonology;

th for the sound [ð, θ]: þencan – thinken, moðor – mother;

sh for the sound [∫]: scip – ship;

gh for the sound [χ] rigt – right;

dg for the sound [dg]: brycg – bridge;